[Coco] booting OS9 from hard drive

[Vern Burke]

Correct me if I mis-remember, but that would only apply to systems set 
up to boot directly completely from the hard drive (ala the old CoCo-XT) 
(yes, I have one and remember going through the tagtrack/bootport/zap 
process :)). The C9 SCSI setup doesn't have any ability to do even a 
partial boot of OS9 (up to the point of loading OS9Boot) from the hard 
drive (I'm following the somewhat limited instructions with my C9 SCSI 
controller).

My understanding of the process is this. The boot starts from the 
floppy, loads the boot track, and loads OS9boot from the floppy. At this 
point, device drivers and such are operational. Init and cc3go do their 
thing to load shell and grfdrv from /dd/cmds (since I patched them that 
way)(/dd is the hard drive descriptor) and then the boot finishes with 
/dd set as the working directory and /dd/cmds set as the execution 
directory. Not as neat as the old CoCo XT but it gets the job done.

In this process I wouldn't expect it to be looking for a boot track or 
os9boot on the hard drive at all, which leaves me wondering just what 
the heck it IS looking for. My kingdom for a debug! :)

Vern


Robert Gault wrote:
> You have not gone far enough with your patching. You will need to change 
> the Boot module which is on track 34. The original one is hard coded for 
> floppy use. It must be replaced with one that can access your hard drive.
> 
> I'm sure that Cloud-9 has documentation on this in the hard drive system 
> owner's manual. I think that there may even be a script buried in the 
> directories of 40tCD2 for NitrOS-9 that will automate the building of 
> the needed boot disk.
> 
> Make sure that your boot disk is only 35 tracks not 40, as RGBDOS and 
> HDBDOS expect the Disk Basic partition of the hard drive to be in 35 
> track segments.
> 
> Vern Burke wrote:
> 
>> Ok, now I'm getting somewhere (I just have no idea where I'm actually 
>> getting <L>). I have a working OS9 boot floppy with working access to 
>> my SCSI hard drive (Cloud 9 TCCC SCSI controller). Now I want to get 
>> set up so I'm booting as much as possible from the hard drive. This is 
>> what I've done so far:
>>
>> Modified the floppy os9boot with ezgen so that the dd descriptor is 
>> the hard drive.
>>
>> Modified the floppy os9boot with ded to change one reference to d0 in 
>> init and two references to d0 in cc3go to dd.
>>
>> (all modules ident correctly with good CRC's)
>>
>> The hard drive contains a cmds directory with shell and grfdrv in it. 
>> All permissions set properly, shell module verified working, grfdrv 
>> copied from the working boot floppy.
>>
>> Startup file temporarily removed for testing.
>>
>> In theory this should be able to start the boot from the floppy and 
>> finish from the hard drive. What actually happens is that the boot 
>> starts, accesses the hard drive, and then goes to "BOOT FAILED" before 
>> the copyright message.
>>
>> What the heck am I missing here? Is the boot process demanding 
>> something else besides shell and grfdrv?
>>
>> Vern
>>
>